zlacker

The submitted article and especially its title are both emotional to a fault and sensationalist. The arguments presented are backed up only by anecdote and cherry-picked comments from other people who have been rejected by Amazon. I've seen all this before. There's a reason why the article is scant on the details of the rejection. In the same way a rant about PayPal tends to exclude certain details that deflate the author's rage. His final paragraph is the icing on the cake. I'm glad to see the title change.

>>coderd+(OP)
It's apparently resonating with the HN audience. I've seen poorly presented material get flagged into null before, so why wouldn't that be the case for this article, if it t'were true?

I am _not_ glad to see the title change, as it goes against the stated rule of titles matching the title of the submitted content and is blatant editorializing that is supposedly verboten on HN. It's ridiculous and unwelcome from my perspective. Especially since it's a multi-billion dollar company involved who can certainly deal with some mild criticism.

>>wavefu+J1
Right now it's fashionable to dislike Amazon. Rants about Amazon are a formula for karma success right now. That's my guess as to why it hasn't been flagged to death. I wouldn't attribute a lack of flagging to legitimacy. HN isn't immune to BS.

>>coderd+(OP)
This is a strange thing to say:

"There's a reason why the article is scant on the details of the rejection"

Did you click through the link to the page where the developers were discussing the certification process on the Amazon developer forum? This is the link the article above:

https://forums.developer.amazon.com/forums/thread.jspa?messa...

This seems as detailed as you will find for a critique of an app store.

And additionally, both of those developers linked to their own blog posts where they offered still more details:

http://www.derpgroup.com/blog/on-the-topic-of-certification

http://ocean-of-storms.com/tsatsatzu/explaining-amazons-indi...

You say the final paragraph is the "icing on the cake". The final paragraph is a summary of what Joseph Jaquinta suggested in his longer post. The above linked blog post would be redundant if it simply copy-and-pasted everything that developers had written over at the Amazon developer forums. Like any blog post, it was written with the assumption that some people would click through the links to see the source material.

>>lkrubn+E2
Actually, I didn't see those. I'll read them.

>>coderd+(OP)
It's scant on the details of the rejection because it wasn't his skill that got rejected. His article is specifically about the uproar among the community at the terrible job they're doing.

As happenstance would have it, though, it was MY skill that got rejected that started the forum thread that he pulled quotes from. If you are actually interested in more details, I can provide them, but the point wasn't really about my specific rejection - it was that this has been an ongoing and growing pattern recently across the entire development community. These issues are well documented and individually enumerated (so as to not just be anecdotal, per your concern) on the Amazon developer forums, if that is what you're looking for.

Regardless, the title may be emotionally driven, but it is not sensationalist. They (the Alexa team) literally do not have a good understanding of how to run this app store. I think the context missing here is that we don't mean that in the sense of "we're angry because our opinion does not match Amazon's". We mean that in the sense that we (and every time I say "we" here I mean the Alexa developer community) has had to hand hold the Alexa team into doing even the most basic things just to get the skill "store" where it is now, because it has not been a focus of theirs.

>>coderd+d2
That may be true, but to be clear, I love the things Amazon produces in general - I just take specific issue with this one team over the last couple months. I can't speak for the other two people cited in the story, but for my part I can say that I absolutely didn't start a rant in Amazon's developer community for the purpose of someone else blogging about it and getting karma on HN.

I'm more interested in the frankly absurd notion that there is this software giant who is supposedly super good at web services, yet is incapable of doing the simplest possible things to sustain its development community. It's an incredible dichotomy - the Mighty Amazon of Prime Now Shipping vs. the Meek Amazon of "How Do We Certify Like Apple?" - but it's one that needs to go away.